VersiDoc
Backstory
A small business owner built a successful document production company, World Copy, through years of continuously improving production methods and developing new tools and technology. The company designed production procedures, a physical environment, custom equipment, tracking, quality control, and project management systems to handle incredible volumes of paper document duplication, numbering, scanning, and coding. Primarily, the company’s success was due to the knowledge and expertise of the production staff and the tools they created to make use of that knowledge.
Problem
With the transition from paper to electronic communication the company’s hard-earned expertise in document production was in danger. In order for the company to survive they needed to transfer their knowledge from a physical world to a digital one.
Solution
Research and Gap Analysis
When we looked at the existing tools and procedures to handle digital document production we found that they were too complex for the intended users. The people who knew documents best were accustomed to working on copiers, not computers. They were used to handling paper and clicking a big green button. The tools available to handle digital documents needed expert computer users to operate who were typically not expert in the handling of documents. They also tended to be averse to the sort of repetitive tasks required to handle large volumes of documents. We found some tools to handle pieces of the production process but nothing that tied them all together in a way that was understandable to the people responsible for managing the entire process.
Identify Core Activities
In order to create a holistic solution we needed to identify all the parts of the whole. This included a thorough analysis of every part of the production process from the initiation of a project to the final follow-through with the customer.
Design Iteratively in Production
Our approach was to design in the wild. In addition to being responsible for the design I would also serve as the production manager, making me responsible for all of the real-life challenges associated with the projects and with management of the production staff. I would use that experience to design the information architecture, interactions and service, along with a development team of two programmers using an agile approach.
To explain the VersiDoc concept I wrote this document for prospective customers who also needed to make the transition from physical to digital document production: What is VersiDoc?
